dan clowes news & jaime hernandez sketches on ebay

new clowes strip running in the ny times sunday magazine, starting sept. 16th, 2007.


on ebay

happy belated 90th birthday jack kirby

marvel comics super-villian galactus, created by jack kirby

barry bonds 756 home run slideshow

on sfgate

video i shot at the bill walsh memorial ceremony (friday, august 10, 2007) at candlestick park

4:17

superbowl XVl highlights. 1:00

superbowl XlX highlights. 1:00

superbowl XXlll highlights… watch for john taylor’s game winning td catch. 1:01

superbowl XXlV highlights… again, don’t miss john taylor’s td catch. 1:04

superbowl XXlX highlights. 1:00

trailer of wong kar-wai’s new short for philips electronics

wkw & william chang’s ‘i travelled 9000 km to give it to you’ for the film “chacun son cinema” cannes festival 2007.

also wkw’s lancome hypnose homme commercial, featuring clive owen & daria werbowy.

lo-fi tangents

giant sof’ boy figurine

press pop site

sof’ boy one of my fave comic characters created by one of my fave cartoonists, archer prewitt from the band ‘the sea and cake,’ and press pop one of my fave comic merchandising companies out of japan created a 2 foot tall sof’ boy figurine. here’s a great slideshow commericial of the figurine with flash animation and sound design:

bill walsh memorial ceremony (friday, august 10, 2007) at candlestick park

(from left to right: jerry rice, bill walsh and john taylor)

my flickr photoset of the memorial ceremony.

some video footage from the memorial:
dennis green

nfl films tribute

sfgate audio slideshow

one of my favorite slideshows with narration, produced by sfgate.com

international home movie day

international home movie day is this coming saturday, aug. 11th. here’s a link to some terrific home movies and a write-up.

ingmar bergman & michelangelo antonioni

in a little while, i’ll have more to say about these 2 titans of art house cinema (especially in the 1960s) who passed on within hours of each other last week. but for now enjoy some images of each director and their muses plus posters from 2 of their well-known films, ‘persona’ and ‘l’eclisse.’

antonioni & the lovely monica vitti with the special jury prize from the 1960 cannes film festival. ‘l’avventura’ was intially booed by the audience until a group of directors and film critics stepped forward and signed and publicly presented a petition of their support for antionioni’s film, which lead to the special jury prize. antonioni’s reputation as a key figure in international art house cinema was forever cemented from this prize.

paul hornschemeier west coast tour 2007

fantagraphics’ flog! mention for pix i took of graphic novelist paul hornschemeier at modern times bookstore during the san francisco stop of his west coast signing tour. paul's a good guy who writes some vivid prose too, in addition to illustrating. and he read to those of us in attendance… a real surprise treat.

ADDENDUM 08.03.07: paul hornschemeier blog mention and also a really humorous account (a terrific demonstration of how funny paul’s writing is) of how things went down the nite of the signing. thanks again for the mention paul.

coach bill walsh continued

some really nice slideshows that capsulized what bill walsh was all about: sfgate & mercury news

coach bill walsh (1931-2007)

coach bill walsh will always be one of my sports heroes and the epitome of class and innovative offensive schemes and a great judge of athletic talent as well as opening up the door for minorities to head coach in the nfl.an amazing 40 assistant coaches have come from bill walsh’s coaching tree and gone on to become nfl head coaches over the past 19 years since walsh retired. plus, another 6 have gone on to become head coaches in college with pete carroll winning 2 national titles with usc and 3 of the 6 being black head coaches (dennis green, tyrone willingham and karl dorrell).

the coaching tree above is actually not complete… here are more head coaches in walsh’s coaching tree, plus a high percentage of all black head coaches in the nfl’s history come from walsh’s coaching tree—that’s 7 of 9 with only art shell and romeo crennel not from walsh’s coaching tree… now that’s simply astounding:

marvin lewis (bengals)
herm edwards (chiefs, jets)
mike nolan (49ers)
norv turner (chargers)
sean payton (saints)
pete carroll (patriots & jets)
dick jauron (bills, bears)
gregg williams (bills)
jim mora, jr. (falcons)
chuck studley (oilers)
david shula (bengals)
dick lebeau (bengals)
mike white (raiders)
lane kiffin (raiders)

nfl head coaches & assistant coaches who became college head coaches afterwards:

dennis green (stanford, northwestern)
tyronne willingham (washington, notre dame, stanford)
pete carroll (usc)
paul hackett (usc, pitt)
karl dorrell (ucla)
tom holmoe (cal)

they are or have coached in the following conferences: pac-10, big 10, big east and independent.

and still more news

submitted my short films to the crackle contest… please vote for me at crackle and the details for voting are here. and you must join crackle in order to vote.

more news

a photo of mine (middle one to the right on the page) from the ‘modern appealing clothing case’ study is in the 06.15.07 issue of weekly italian magazine ‘fashion,’ page 101. accompanied by an image of the issue’s cover, which the photo appears within.

news

07.05.07: special thanks to david hudson over at greencine daily for the “online viewing tips, round 2” mention and link to my short films in the july 5th entry.

06.29.07: special thanks to pete over at yelp.com for posting my new yelp business listing with photo gallery.

pssst

wtf! why the title ‘pssst’… because that’s the sound
filipinos make to get your attention

meditation

inspired by antonio carlos jobim’s classic bossa nova tune and the melancholic aftermath of “the chairman of the board” & “the flower child’s” break up
4:07

wing shya, image-maker

Wing Shya is a Hong Kong based photographer (schooled at the Emily Carr Institute in Canada for four years), who also runs a design studio called Shya-la-la Workshop. Beginning with 1997’s Happy Together to 2046, Wing is best known as the exclusive still photographer and graphic designer for director Wong Kar-wai’s films and projects, which examine time, memory, nostalgia, missed connections, and melancholy. While his primary contribution is shooting publicity stills for the director’s films, Wing, through his studio, also produces special edition books, compact disc chapbooks, postcards, and posters, which allow one to relive Wong’s films—in effect reinterpreting those films in print. My appreciation of Wing’s work for Wong is that they are both presenting a modern image of the Chinese as hip, complex, sophisticated, glamorous, and contemporary, showing us that the Chinese are just as fascinating in their own way as the rest of us.

Wing’s first involvement with Wong was a poster he designed for Chungking Express (1994), a film that finds hip citizens of Hong Kong, falling in and out of love. The poster is a collage of different characters that capture their celluloid moods along with objects and moments from the film. The poster immediately elicits intrigue derived from the situations and attitude of the narrative. By choosing collage, Wing accomplishes the dual feat of communicating different aspects of the film as well as designing a strikingly bold layout. He uses yellow type to set apart the text information from the images, but it also compliments the photos. The torn edges of the character photos symbolize their individual hipness that is the badge of youth.

Happy Together (1997) is Wing and Wong next film, which produced a photo book, two different versions of compact disc packaging, and Shya’s graphic design and photography, which found its way onto some international posters. Wing shot with AGFA film stock, using Fuji mid-format cameras with auto-focus along with snapshot cameras. His decision to use these tools captures the complexity of two Chinese gay men’s dreamy melancholy as they fall in and out of love during their stay in Buenos Aires. Green is one of the symbolizing colors, along with the murky saturated look of other colors (such as brown and red), which capture the sadness of tears. The sepia color tone of some images in the Happy Together book conveys the passage of time, and the mementos of the two characters’ travels recorded and kept in this personal diary of sorts. Wing achieved some of these effects by staining the prints with coffee sometimes or bathing the prints for about a month. Also, the collage of photo scraps conveys the intimacy of personal experience. The film was released in 1997, which parallels the year the British transferred Hong Kong back to China. This was a watershed year for modern Hong Kong culture and identity. The world certainly knew Hong Kong was under British rule but had a vague association of who these people are. In Happy Together, Wing portrays these characters as rootless exiles who are emotionally complex.

In the Mood for Love (2000) is the third project that Wing, once again, designed a photo book, two different compact disc packages, and his photography was on most of the international posters. The film nostalgically revisits Hong Kong’s recent past of the early 1960s about two neighbors who discover their spouses are having an affair with each other. The two neighbors decide to investigate how the affair started and how it thrived through role-playing. Nostalgia is a key theme, and red (a traditional Chinese color tied to passion) symbolizes it as though scorching an impression on to memory. Hong Kong looks just as modern as Las Vegas of that era, yet uniquely Chinese. Modern loneliness of uprooted young married couples moving to a cosmopolitan city, such as Hong Kong, is captured. The surface glamour of the new class of working professionals and their possessions are motifs that Wing and Wong incorporate into the imagery, which show a glamorous and sophisticated but lonely side of the early 1960s’ Hong Kong lifestyle. Wing created the compact disc release as an LP format booklet. He emphasizes red as the expressive color of repressed desire and crops the main characters into legs and torsos, emphasizing the mystique of role-playing an illicit extramarital affair yet not wanting to be caught. For the photo book, Wing photographs in tight close-ups and crops set in bedrooms or hotels that the young neighbors frequent to discover themselves how their spouses’ affair carried on. Wing and In the Mood for Love’s nostalgic tone of 1960s seems to say that Hong Kong had also begun grappling with modern society’s dilemmas, such as infidelity due to professional careers causing spousal neglect.

A non-film project that Wong and Wing collaborated on was a 2001 photo shoot for French Vogue with actress Gong Li. Gong typically plays roles set in feudal China or looks very frumpy in more contemporary roles—an image a few people associate Chinese women with. Wing and Wong succeed in updating Gong Li’s image as a very feminine and erotic character caught in intrigue. The photos express, a kind of vampy kinkiness of femininity if you will, that the West finds alluring.

2046 (2004) concerns one of the characters from In the Mood for Love coping with an unrequited love. In order to maintain the sensation of that feeling, the character writes a novel set in 2046 based on people and experiences in his present reality. For 2046, Wing shot in a wide aspect ratio that parallels a film frame. By using the wide aspect ration, Wing is able to utilize space to isolate characters in the frame, thereby conveying emotional distance and loneliness. Since the narrative goes back forth between the 1960s and a futuristic 2046, Wing is able to play with different moods. The future is shot in saturated colors predominately in an orange, red hue. The settings are sleek and new and the costumes are edgy-looking, hence Wing and Wong’s projection of what the Chinese will look like in 2046 looks very contemporary for today. The 1960s are shot in darker colors predominately brown, which subconsciously conveys an aged passage of time or more precisely Wong and Wing’s color to represent nostalgia. The settings are aged, such as walls that are highly textured from being cracked or peeling. The costumes evoke an early 1960s decadence of modernity. The focus in the photos is some times soft and the prints are grainy. This adds to feeling of traveling back into one’s memories, seeking an image of a particular moment. Although the film is fictional, the eras allude to Hong Kong before and after the British transfer, a sort of time capsule of Hong Kong’s development as an international cultural presence.

Wong Kar-wai is the key to Wing’s most recognized work. The production of Wong’s films provides the mood, characters, set pieces, and scenario, which Wing then captures with his expressive and striking photography. Wing then alters the images and designs books, posters, postcards, and chapbooks to re-express the mood and feeling of those films. Through his use of film stock, camera formats, design layout, and printing techniques, Wing has re-expressed Wong’s films in photography and print. When Wing does not work with Wong, his photos are well crafted but lack a subtext that is only found in his work for Wong. For instance, his photography for the Louis Vuitton campaign seems to force the melancholy and pensiveness that are evocative in his photographs for Wong; part of the problem is editorial parameters from clients—an issue Shya doesn’t encounter with Wong, who allows Wing to work freely from his suggestions. The body of work that Wing has done for Wong is key to presenting a modern Chinese persona of being hip, complex, sophisticated, glamorous, and contemporary. Wing as a photographer and designer has cultivated the modern Chinese image, which is the next most influential facet (after its military and economic might) of a nation wanting its presence felt throughout the world.